The result completely destroyed the simplicity of the 'substance and attribute' theory of perception. What we see depends on the light entering the eye. Furthermore we do not even perceive what enters the eye. The things transmitted are waves or--as Newton thought--minute particles, and the things seen are colours. Locke met this difficulty by a theory of primary and secondary qualities. Namely, there are some attributes of the matter which we do perceive. These are the primary qualities, and there are other things which we perceive, such as colours, which are not attributes of matter, but are perceived by us as if they were such attributes. These are the secondary qualities of matter. Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an extremely unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what the theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to. There is now reigning in philosophy and in science an apathetic acquiescence in the conclusion that no coherent account can be given of nature as it is disclosed to us in sense-awareness, without dragging in its relations to mind. The modern account of nature is not, as it should be, merely an account of what the mind knows of nature; but it is also confused with an account of what nature does to the mind. The result has been disastrous both to science and to philosophy, but chiefly to philosophy. It has transformed the grand question of the relations between nature and mind into the petty form of the interaction between the human body and mind. Berkeley's polemic against matter was based on this confusion introduced by the transmission theory of light. He advocated, rightly as I think, the abandonment of the doctrine of matter in its present form. He had however nothing to put in its place except a theory of the relation of finite minds to the divine mind. But we are endeavouring in these lectures to limit ourselves to nature itself and not to travel beyond entities which are disclosed in sense-awareness. Percipience in itself is taken for granted. We consider indeed conditions for percipience, but only so far as those conditions are among the disclosures of perception. We leave to metaphysics the synthesis of the knower and the known. Some further explanation and defence of this position is necessary, if the line of argument of these lectures is to be comprehensible.